PowerPC :: 1.5GB IBook Is Very Slow?

Nov 7, 2007

After doing some iWeb+Safari and all my other apps, I bought a 1GB stick because it was pretty choppy with 768. After installing the new stick, I now have 1.5GB. When I type in iWeb, my letters still appear after i type them. The bigger the page (text wize), the more lag in letter appearance. IMO, it seems slower than before I upgraded the memory.

My PC has 256MB of ram and can do much more much faster.

While the letters lag in iWeb, I still have over 700MB free according to activity monitor. Before the ram upgrade, I was using pretty much all my memory (under 50MB left).

Is there some "time" which the new RAM readjusts itself in it's first boot? It does say 1.5GB in activity monitor. Is it possible that the ram doesn't actually work and I'm running 512MB?

I just bought a used ibook g3 700mhz, 640mb ram, 22.5 of 30 gb HD space free. OSX 10.4.11 just installed cleanly. Pretty much everything I do is really slow and I cannot figure out for the life of me why. Simple procedures like opening the applications folder even take a long time. With the features, I would have expected this computer to be a lot faster. Am I wrong?

I also have a g4 tower with basically the same specs and it is MUCH faster.Anyone who can shed some light on this situation for me is greatly appreciated.

hey i got a iBook and reinstalled the software and replaced the HD to something slightly newer. I did a hardware test and everything is working, just the battery is crap but i don't wanna buy for 100. im ok with ti being plugged in all the time im just wondering, any way to speed it up? i was windering about leopard. i hear it doesnt run well.

Anyway I noticed the HDD is down to 10GB left out of 28GB or whatever it is. And it seems like the thing is just so slow. Safari just clocks and times out and quits. Everything else just seem unusually slow.

Should i revert back to 10.4? Or is there something else I can look at to help the old G4 work a tad faster.

What's strange about this problem is that it's the second time that it's happened to me (once a few months ago). I've got an iBook G4 from a few years ago, never had a problem, but out of the blue today my computer took about 15 minutes to get to the main loading screen. Everything is slowed down immensely, so I'm not really sure what to do. I checked the activity monitor and it seems okay, although it spikes on the disk activity screen randomly even if I am not running any other programs for both data read and data written.

I have an iBook G4 1.42Ghz with 1.5GB of RAM. I have noticed lately (past month) that it has been slowing down...A BIG SLOW DOWN. You would think even with 1.5GB of RAM, there should be no slow down, but I guess I was wrong. I did a Hardware test using the install disks and everything is OK. Should I erase my HD and just re-install OS X? If you guys got any other suggestions please let me know.

well like the title says, my iBook was running just fine, and for some reason when i start it up yesterday it took like minute and a half to start up, when it usually starts in a bout less than a minute, and once its up i get the beach ball everytime i do something, is driving me crazy! my ibook, is a g3 800mhz, 640 ram, mac os 10.4.10, what could be wrong with it??

On speedtest.net to Montreal I get around 4-5mbps download usually. On another laptop, I get 15-18mbps. laptops are side-by-side. It also randomly will stop working (ie in Firefox it'll take a minute to open a page (that's just doing the hostname lookup.. I use free DNS servers, my ISP's were slow.)

Any reason why the airport extreme card is extremely slow? Also, when I do a direct ethernet connect, it's also slow... ?

I did get 11 mbps a long time ago, I never seemed to get that again. I am using 10.4.11, 1.2ghz, 768mb ram. I do the speedtest when basically nothing is running (Adium/Skype is all pretty much).

I have had my iBook for a good 4 years now. I have a 1.2ghz G4 ppc running Tiger and it is starting to run slow. I noticed that videos will now pause if something else is running or downloading. This never happened before. I was thinking about reinstalling my OS but would like to avoid that. Does anyone have this same problem or have any tricks to speed this up again?

I have a 1.2 Ghz Power PC Ibook that has been a flawless laptop for almost two years now. Yesterday, I noticed that the screen wold periodically dim/brighten every couple of seconds. As I looked at the battery icon, I noticed that each time it dimmed, the charge icon would switch to a battery (as if the laptop wasn't plugged in), and each time it brightened, the corresponding charge icon would appear.

This happens even though it is plugged in, and usually, if I adjust the power cord, then it stops. But each time I have had to do this, it becomes less responsive to the method! Now I'm afraid my computer will simply die a slow death, with me frantically jiggling a cord to no avail, watching as it breathes its last breath, unable to be repowered!

PS: I'm an American, in Germany, who will be in London next week and able to visit a genius bar there...but I'm not positive that my warrranty extends beyond American borders.

I was recently given a (supposedly) non-functional iBook. I reinstalled Tiger on it, and it did fine through the installation and initial startup. However, everything runs really, really slow. It will work normally for about 5 seconds, and then slow to a crawl. Opening system preferences just took 5 minutes. The beach ball shows up with nearly every click.

Anyone know what this means? Bad ram? Bad HD? It is the 14" 1.42 ghz model with 756 mb ram.

Oh yeah, the reason it was presumed dead was because the previous owner smacked it on something, and the LCD screen is bashed up. The rest of it seems physically fine, but it was subject to some sort of impact.

My main lappy is a last revision 1.33GHz 12" iBook G4 with GB of RAM. In the past month or so, it has gotten slower and slower. Everything lags, and today when I entered an address into Camino, it took it a full 90 seconds to realize I had pressed enter, and get rid of the drop-down autocomplete.

I recently upgraded to Leopard. I thought this would help, but apparently not. Sadly. I just purchased a T41 ThoughtlessPad because i needed a FUNCTIONAL laptop.

Activity monitor shows over 800mb of ram free, and about 16000/0 page ins/outs.

The CPU is also about 80% idle.

Something is fishy. There is only 6GB of free hard drive space.. but I don't see how that could cause this nightmarishly slow performance. It takes 5 minutes to open a folder sometimes! Could it be bad ram? Malfunctioning hard drive? Does it sound like a hardware issue or software issue?

I also noticed that there were a few folders in the hard drive such as "Previous Systems" "Rescued files" and "Damaged files." I already trashed "Damaged files" because it was just a bunch of random crap that no one would need and it was taking up space.

Her laptop is running terribly slow. She uses this computer for iTunes/iPod and running Safari and Word...not much else. Not sure why she would be having any problems. Hardrive space isn't a problem, as there is about 10G availableThe computer boots VERY slow...it takes at least 5 minutes. Once running, launching any application takes much longer than it should. Surfing the net also is very spotty. A page will load, then for no reason, the spinning beach ball (SBB) pops up and freezes the computer for 30 seconds to a minute. This happens the entire time online for any page...even after the page is fully loaded the computer continues to have the SBB appear every few minutes. This issue is not isolated to Safari...it seems the entire OS is lagging horribly. I tried running Disk Utility, which couldn't even finish. After spending 10+ minutes with the progress bar not moving, I gave up.

I have an IBOOK G4 running Tiger 10.4.11, which recently I upgraded from 768M to 1.25G RAM. It has an 80G HD which has about 50G free. I use it generally email and surfing the web. Recently, it started to run slow. Seems to be while surfing the internet. I use Safari. While surfing a while back it became very slow to respond on web pages, mostly got the "spinning color wheel", and then got pretty hot and the fan came on, first time I have heard the fan since I have had it.

After researching, I downloaded Onyx maintenance program. After doing a thorough maintenance using Onyx, everything seems to be back to normal. Well, a few days later, after using laptop for quite a while roughly 1 1/2 hours, started to run slow while surfing again. Slow to respond, spinning wheel again, but the mouse (bluetooth) movement is never affected.

My old clamshell iBook seems to be running very slow suddenly, I have to wait for typing to catch up with me and in this chatroom I go in, the chat screen keeps filling in and changing to same colour as background so I cant read what people have sent into room or and all buttons disappear until I run cursor over where they were!

It doesnt do this when I go in same room on iMac. It didnt used to do it on the iBook either! is it just getting old and needs replacing? Think mine was made in 2000, so is about 8 years old.

How do I do things like disk defragment or see how much hard drive and memory is been used? I wondered if it was maybe full?

Hi EveryoneI have an iBook G4 with 800MHz and 512 MB. I understand this is the max I can run this on. I really cannot afford a new one now and wondered if there was a way to increase the memory at all or get it to run faster. I deleted programs I do not use but it is still slow.

I recently bought myself an Xtra monitor to hook up to my Ibook. I also used the hack to be able to split up the monitors to have full resolution of my new monitor.

but now my computer is running slower. somewhere in this forum I have found out that because of the hack my Ibook now has to work extra hard to be able to run on 2 monitors.

my question is, isn't there a way to be able to use my new monitor at full resolution and just shut of the original Ibook monitor? so my Ibook does not have to split up his memory? If I mirror them I Can't work on full resolution ...

somebody doing this?

Or... What do I do/buy/download that my Ibook can work on 2 monitors, but doesn't run slower.

I have a G3 iBook and just the other day the display stopped working. There were no signs of the display going bad, it's just went. Am I able to boot the iBook via Target Disk Mode on my PowerBook and run the iBook Hardware Test CD on it? Also, can I reboot my PowerBook and choose the iBook as the startup volume?

My brother's iBook G4 (800Mhz, First Rev) has completely splattered itself and we're getting a new Macbook for him under insurance. My iBook G3 (White, 900Mhz G3..the last G3 Rev of the iBook) has a failing hard drive.

Now, could I swap out those two drives, at least to recover stuff? And is there a specific method of opening up the iBook G4 so that I don't break stuff (I've already messed with my G3..and ended up with a dozen extra screws ^_^

Mainly the aim is to salvage the hard drive and swap them out; replacing my faulty iBook G3 one with the iBook G4 one which is perfectly fine.

Hey guys, i got an old Powerbook that the whole family use to surf the net. I notice its been super slow lately. Ive never had a problem with this notebook, I've only done 2 reinstall in the time ive owned it. I recentluy did another one, and notice its still slow, loading websites is slow, cant watch movies on it. This is a notebook i use to do photoshop and illustrator work on.

Do you think its just its time? I think it could be the hard drive or memory, is there any type of diagnostic i can do to find out what the problem is?

I just bought a parts ibook from ebay, but I managed to fix it, except there was no hard drive. I currently have a 6 GB HD in it with OS X.3.9 on it, but I want tiger. I have the tiger family pack, so I have a license for it. It only has a CD-ROM drive, so I am wondering if I can buy a 40 GB HD, and clone the one from my G4 onto it.

So, I'll spare you guys the details, haha, but I am stuck trying to decide between getting an iMac Intel or a MacBook Pro for my home use computer. What would be the advantages of one over the other? I just really love the fact that a MacBook Pro would be portable yet powerful. And yes, I have this iBook for portability to school and such, but if I want to do extensive work on the couch, I could bring a MBP vs. an iMac. What do you all think? Are too laptops redundant?

I only use my ibook g4 for the internet, but even this is slow, like half second delay on the menus etc (FF3 & Safari). I have run Onyx and cleaned it, but it is still the same. it has 640mb memory on tiger with over 3.8gb of free space on the Hard drive.